The “Stamp of Guantanamo”

The Story of Seven Men Betrayed by Russia’s Diplomatic Assurances to the United States

Map of Russia

2007 John Emerson

Summary

The people now being released from the US detention facility in GuantanamoBay
have already been deprived of their
freedom without due process. In sending them back to their home countries, the US
government has evidently concluded
that they have not, after all, committed any crimes
against the United States,
or that they possess no useful information about terrorism,
or that there is insufficient evidence to prove their criminal
intent. Or perhaps, just that keeping them at Guantanamo is more trouble than they are
worth.

For seven citizens of Russia,
being released from GuantanamoBay in 2004 was far from
the end of their troubles. Despite promises to the US
government to treat the men humanely upon their return, the Russian authorities have variously
harassed, detained, mistreated, and beaten the former Guantanamo detainees since they
returned.At this writing, two of them have been tortured and are in prison after investigations and trials that did not meet international fair trial standards; one has been tortured and is in prison awaiting trial;
the other four are either abroad or in hiding.Taken together, their stories
amount to a powerful indictment of the inept and abusive practices of the Russian criminal
justice system.

But their stories
amount to something more: they also expose the harmful consequences of transferring terrorist
suspects to countries where they are
at risk of torture.

Previous Human Rights Watch reports, as well as the work of
many other human rights and
international organizations, have extensively documented the cruelty of Russian
criminal justice.Torture and the denial of the right to a fair trial
are endemic in Russian police investigations and trials,
and in many ways the treatment of the seven former Guantanamo detainees does
not differ significantly from that of many other Russian Muslims who are caught
up in the wide dragnet of Russia's counterterrorism campaign-or indeed, the treatment of anyone
unlucky enough to be suspected of a crime
in Russia. The experience of these
seven men should be viewed in light of Russia's problematic conduct of the
so-called "war on terror," and its highly abusive criminal
justice system. But as seven men marked by the "stamp of Guantanamo" (in the words of one of them),
they have endured a particularly harrowing odyssey at the hands of Russian law
enforcement.

This report uses the Russian example to reveal the hollow
nature of the "diplomatic assurances" that the US
government is seeking as it transfers Guantanamo
detainees back to their countries of
origin, many of which have well
documented records of torture.Under the
United Nations (UN) Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or
Degrading Treatment or Punishment,
as well as domestic law, the United
States is prohibited from returning people
to countries where there are
substantial grounds for believing they would face a danger of torture.So the US government-like a growing number
of others-is asking governments for "diplomatic assurances" that they will not
torture or mistreat terrorist
suspects upon return.

Such an assurance was sought and obtained from the Russian
government in 2004, before the seven detainees were flown home.Both the US and Russian governments declined
to release any substantive information to Human Rights Watch about their 2004
agreement to return the seven detainees.Each government issued only the sketchiest of statements on March 1, 2004, the day the
detainees landed at Moscow's
Sheremetyevo international airport. What agreements the two governments really
made remains opaque.

But one fact remains blindingly clear and is extensively
documented in this report: Russian law enforcement agents hounded and abused
these seven hapless men almost continuously after their return from Guantanamo, ending finally
in the arrest or flight of almost all of them.Some endured mistreatment in detention that amounted to torture.Whatever promises of fair treatment were made
by the Russian authorities, they
clearly have been broken.

The US
government has triply wronged these
men: first by detaining them without due process, second by returning them to Russia
in violation of international law, and third by failing to follow and protest
their mistreatment by Russian authorities
after their return. In this last aspect, the Russian government of course bears
the greatest and most immediate
responsibility. But by branding these seven men "terrorist
suspects," the US
government certainly rendered them more vulnerable targets for Russian abuse.
In this sad post-Guantanamo tale, both the US and Russian governments have a
great deal to answer for.

Recommendations
to the US government

Halt
immediately the use of
diplomatic assurances against torture for the transfer of any person in US
custody who is at risk of such
abuse upon return, and urge other governments to do the same.

Ensure
that any decision to transfer is made in full compliance with the US's
domestic and international obligation not to return any person to a place
where there are substantial grounds for believing that he or she would be
at risk of being subjected to
torture.

Ensure that any person subject to transfer from GuantanamoBay to his home or a third country
has an effective opportunity to challenge his transfer before an impartial
body, including the reliability
of any diplomatic assurances, based on fear of torture upon return.

Refrain from urging other governments to
detain and prosecute Guantanamo
detainees unless there is adequate public evidence to support a prima facie case that the detainees are
responsible for criminal acts.

Protest
publicly and at the diplomatic level the mistreatment of former GuantanamoBay detainees when evidence of such
abuse is revealed.

Urge
the Russian government and the governments of all nationals returned from
Guantanamo Bay to permit visits to their countries
in the form of universal access and
confidential visits to all detainees, including
former Guantanamo inmates by independent, internationally reputable nongovernmental or humanitarian
organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross; and UN
special mechanisms (such as the
special rapporteur on torture).

Recommendations to the Russian government

Stop
the persecution of former Guantanamo
detainees and promptly restore to them all national identity papers and
internal passports; international passports should also be granted unless
reasonable grounds exist to deny them and opportunities are made available
to challenge those denials.

Halt immediately
the use of diplomatic assurances against torture for the transfer (whether
to or from Russia)
of any person who is at risk of
such abuse upon return.

Fully
and fairly investigate the claims of torture and ill-treatment of Rasul
Kudaev, Timur Ishmuratov, and Ravil Gumarov, and hold accountable anyone
found responsible for it; make the results of the investigations publicly
available.

Allow
individual complaints of torture to be heard by oversight bodies
established under international treaties. This would entail declaring under Article 22 of the Convention against
Torture that the Committee against Torture could receive individual
complaints against Russia,
as well as acceding to the 1976 Optional Protocol to the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Permit
international monitoring of all
detainees in Russia
under conditions of confidentiality and universal access, including visits with former Guantanamo detainees, by:

oissuing
a standing invitation to all UN special mechanisms,
in particular the special rapporteur on torture, ensuring unfettered
access in full conformity with that mandate's long-established terms of
reference.

oacceding
to the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, which provides for
visits by international and national groups to monitor detainee treatment; and

opermitting
access by international humanitarian
organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross; permitting
access by reputable independent nongovernmental
organizations, both national and international.

Methodology

This report draws on Human Rights Watch interviews with
three of the former detainees one in person, although he declined to give a full
interview, and two by telephone. In some citations the time and place of Human
Rights Watch's interview have been withheld to protect the interviewee. In
addition, Human Rights Watch spoke with several of the detainees' family members, lawyers, and human rights
activists, and examined official court papers, taped testimony to other human rights organizations, photographs, and media accounts, to document the human rights abuses suffered by these seven men after they
got back to Russia.[1]

One of the former detainees, Airat Vakhitov,
agreed to speak with Human Rights Watch, he said, because he felt the story of
the Russian detainees' experiences
back home had not yet been told.[2]

Background

All seven Russian inmates who were returned to Russia-Rustam
Akhmiarov, Ravil Gumarov, Timur
Ishmuratov, Shamil Khazhiev, Rasul Kudaev, Ruslan Odizhev, and Airat Vakhitov[3]-were
originally detained by US forces in
Afghanistan or Pakistan.Although it is difficult to generalize about
seven men of different ages from different regions of Russia, they shared some common
traits.All of them are not of Russian
ethnicity, and come from ethnic minorities
in Russia
that have traditionally been Muslim.In
general they did not come from privileged
or well-to-do families, though at least two of them had received higher
education and spoke several languages, such as Arabic.[4]Although they embraced different levels of piety, at least some of
them claim they went to Afghanistan as a
religious undertaking, either to learn more about Islamic government under the
Taliban or to study Islam.[5]Several said they fell prisoner to General Dostum, the Uzbek warlord in the
north who had long battled the Taliban, and were survivors of a prison massacre at Qala-e Jangi, a fortress
controlled by Dostum, in late 2001.

All of them came into US
custody, one way or another, not long after the US
invasion of Afghanistan,
and were transferred through detention facilities in Afghanistan before ending up at GuantanamoBay on various
dates during 2002.

In statements to the
British human rights
organization Reprieve, which is
helping to prepare lawsuits against US officials for torture and ill-treatment
suffered by detainees at Guantanamo, six of the seven detainees described their treatment at US bases in Kunduz, Bagram,
and especially Kandahar and Guantanamo Bay.[6]
The statements all reflected that mistreatment by US forces in Afghanistan, and especially at Kandahar, was especially
severe: beatings; deliberately inflicting serious
pain upon the wounded (by deliberately letting stretchers drop, forexample); forcing detainees to kneel on small
rocks for hours with their hands behind their heads;exposing detainees to the elements,
especially cold; denying medical treatment, especially for the wounded; jumping
and landing with the knees on the backs of detainees' heads; depriving detainees of sleep; forcing detainees to run
while shackled in painful positions; threatening detainees with dogs;
desecrating the Koran and interfering
with daily prayers; and at least initially, failing to honor the dietary restrictions of Muslims. Some said bright lights were shone on their faces throughout
the night; others described crude
and degrading attempts at sexual humiliation.

All the detainees interviewed by Reprieve
uniformly described the transport to
Guantanamo as particularly painful: the flight lasted more than 24 hours, during which time each detainee was tightly shackled
at the ankles and wrists and not
allowed to move, not even to rest his body against a neighbor. The detainees
wore masks through which it was difficult to breathe, as well as goggles and
earmuffs that clamped painfully on the sides of the head.No bathroom breaks were allowed.

At GuantanamoBay the detainees
received different kinds of treatment. None of the six who spoke to Reprieve said they were beaten. But all complained of
intense psychological pressure, including
long periods in solitary
confinement, sexual humiliation inflicted by female staff, sleep deprivation, and the spraying of a pepper gas that in
some cases may have caused long-term damage to the eyes. Many complained of
being put in a freezing cold room for several hours, sometimes after being
allowed to "shower" but given no towel to dry off, apparently to worsen the
experience of cold.All of them were given injections without
information about what the syringes
contained, and some said they felt seriously
ill afterward.Several complained of
extreme disorientation and despair
in not knowing when or if they would ever be released.[7]

Despite this litany of mistreatment, when he was asked to
compare his treatment at the hands of the Americans
and at the hands of the Russians after his return, Ravil Gumarov told Human
Rights Watch, "In the final analysis, the Russians were worse."[8]
The detainees' experience in Russia
is the focus of this report.

US Refoulement to Russia: A Violation of the Prohibition against
Torture

The prohibition against torture is absolute. War, national
emergency, the imminent threat of terrorist
attack-none may be invoked to justify torture.[9]
Many international declarations and treaties[10]have repeated this prohibition, which finds
its fullest articulation in the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel,
Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment.

The same absolute prohibition applies to sending people back
to countries where they will be at risk of torture or ill-treatment.The Convention against Torture forbids the
"refoulement" of a person to countries
"where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger
of being subjected to torture."[11]The US government reaffirmed that principle in the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, which states in Section 1242, "It
shall be the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise
effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are
substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being
subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in
the United States."[12]

Although the Bush administration
has recently attempted (unsuccessfully) to redefine torture, it has not
directly challenged this principle
of nonrefoulement for torture. Instead, the US government has attempted to
evade this important legal obligation by obtaining "diplomatic assurances" of
humane treatment from governments with a record of torture.[13]

Diplomatic Assurances

Particularly since the attacks of September
11, 2001 in the United States, the US and other governments have increasingly
sought to return alleged terrorist
suspects to countries where they
face a risk of torture by obtaining
from their governments "diplomatic assurances" that the suspects will be
treated humanely back home.

Diplomatic assurances take a variety
of forms. Some are simply oral promises. Others are written
documents, in some cases signed by officials of both governments. The content
of the assurances also varies, and
assurances against torture are sometimes packaged with other promises, such as
a commitment to a fair trial. Some
assurances do no more than reiterate that the receiving government will respect
its domestic law or its obligations under international human rights law.

Governments that have transferred or tried
to transfer suspects with such "assurances" include
Austria,
Canada, Georgia, Germany,
the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden,
Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The receiving countries have included
China, Egypt, Jordan,
Morocco, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Yemen, all of which have well
documented records of torture. The US
government has been particularly eager to use such "assurances" as it begins to
repatriate detainees from GuantanamoBay.

Human Rights Watch opposes the use of "diplomatic assurances"
in returning suspects to countries
where they are at risk of torture.
Governments that engage in torture routinely deny it and refuse to investigate
allegations of torture.A government
that is already violating its international obligation not to torture cannot be
trusted to abide by a further "assurance" that it will not torture.This report provides evidence of precisely
that fact, in the case of Russia.

The bankrupt nature of "diplomatic assurances" has received
little attention in part because none of the governments involved want to admit
to it.The receiving countries deny that they practice
torture and do not want to concede further that they broke a bilateral promise
of humane treatment.The sending countries, meanwhile, have no incentive to admit that the
promises of humane treatment they received accomplished nothing and that they
therefore violated their obligations under international law.

In response to a query from Human Rights Watch, the US
government said in an email: "[T]he U.S. government has made clear on numerous
occasions that it reviews humane treatment concerns relating to transfers out
of Guantanamo and will not transfer an individual to a country where that
individual is more likely than not to be tortured. Where necessary in
order to address humane treatment concerns, the U.S. seeks assurances from the
receiving government. This framework applied with respect to the transfer
of the seven Russian nationals." [14]

Some sending governments have negotiated agreements to monitor
the treatment of the suspects after they have been returned to their home countries.Human
Rights Watch has documented elsewhere that such monitoring
agreements have not ensured humane treatment.[15]Moreover, by its very nature, torture is practiced in secret,
often using techniques that defy easy detection (for example, mock drowning,
sexual assault, and psychological abuse).In some countries medical
personnel in detention facilities monitor the abuse to ensure that the torture
is not easily detected.And detainees
subjected to torture are often afraid to complain to anyone for fear of reprisals against them or their family members.[16]

Lack of confidentiality makes it virtually impossible to
monitor an isolated detainee. If observers
have access to all detainees in a facility, and are able to speak with
detainees privately, a detainee can
report an incident of abuse to them without fear that he or she will be
identified by the authorities, and
subject to reprisals. Such
confidentiality cannot be provided when only one detainee or a small group is
being monitored.

In the case of Russia,
the US government appears to
have made no attempt to either monitor or protest the inhumane treatment of the
seven ex-Guantanamo detainees in Russia,
despite the fact that it was aware of Russia's pattern of abusive
treatment.US
officials told Human Rights Watch in July 2006 that they were not making any
effort to monitor the treatment of former Guantanamo
detainees in Russia.[17]

Simply monitoring
a detainee's treatment after he returns home will not guarantee that he will
not be tortured. But that does not mean the US
government should simply ignore the fate of the detainees it has rendered to Russia.Such has been its policy until now.To protest the treatment of the detainees in Russia would certainly open the US
government to charges of hypocrisy.But the US failure to investigate and
protest their ill-treatment means that the Russian government has so far felt
no pressure, no spotlight, no brake of any kind on its abuse of the seven
ex-Guantanamo detainees. Although the US should never have returned the detainees to Russia
in the first place, it ought to reverse course and seize the opportunity to
protest their ill-treatment now.

The Risk of Torture and Ill-Treatment in Russia

At the time these Russian citizens were sent back from Guantanamo, the US
government was clearly aware that evidence of the risk
of torture in Russia
was abundant. The US State Department's own human rights
report for 2003, the most recent volume at the time of their refoulement, said
about Russia, "There were credible reports that law enforcement personnel
frequently engaged in torture, violence, and other brutal or humiliating
treatment and often did so with impunity."[18]
In June 2002, the United Nations Committee against Torture, the body
responsible for monitoring state
party compliance with the Convention against Torture, had voiced its strong
concern at the "[n]umerous and consistent allegations of widespread torture and
other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment
of detainees committed by [Russia's] law enforcement personnel, commonly with a
view to obtaining confessions."[19]
The Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture visited Russia
in December 2001 and published its
report about the continuing problem of torture on June 30, 2003, citing a "disturbing number of
allegations of physical ill-treatment" by police.[20]

In addition to governmental and intergovernmental sources of
information about torture in Russia,
international human rights groups
have also written extensively about
the widespread torture and mistreatment of criminal
suspects in police custody in Russia.[21]
As Human Rights Watch reported in 1999, torture and ill-treatment of detainees
generally occurs at the time of and immediately
after arrest, often through police beatings, near-asphyxiations, and the
application of electroshock in the pursuit of confessions or testimony incriminating others. Aside from a very few
high-profile cases in which officers
have been punished for such
mistreatment, the Russian police carry out torture with almost complete
impunity. Provincial and federal prosecutors close their eyes to evidence of
abuse. The courts commonly accept forced confessions at face value, and use
them as a basis for convictions.
Despite overwhelming evidence that torture has become an integral part of
police practice, the Russian
government and law enforcement agencies generally-with some notable
exceptions-deny that torture or ill-treatment is a problem, and are not taking
any measures to end these abusive practices.[22]

Russia
extensively used torture against Muslim detainees, especially Chechens accused
of "terrorism," before September 11. But the advent of the international "war
on terror" appears to have hardened the Russian government's treatment of such
suspects. The Russian human rights
organization Memorial stated in
February 2006, "We have
extensive evidence to suggest that under the pretext of fighting 'Islamic
extremism' and 'international terrorism,'
a large-scale campaign of persecution of Muslim followers of so-called
'unconventional' Islamic sects has been launched in Russia."[23]
Memorial estimates that torture was
used in more than 40 percent of the cases involving Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist organization with an international
presence that has been banned in Russia.[24]

Given the massive evidence about torture in Russia, it is virtually impossible to imagine
that US officials were not cognizant of the risk
that the Guantanamo
detainees would be tortured, or that they did not understand the extent of the risk.

Two of the Russian detainees told Human Rights Watch that US
interrogators at GuantanamoBay were clearly aware
that they would face torture and mistreatment back home.Indeed, interrogators used the threat of
return as a pressure tactic in interrogations: "The Americans
frightened us with return to Russia, [and] said that in Russia, we will be tortured,"[25]
Airat Vakhitov told Human Rights
Watch. "There was constant blackmail," Ravil Gumarov told Human Rights Watch.
"They kept saying, 'We'll send you to Russia,' that 'They'll string you up there' and that kind of thing."[26]

They said, "If you don't tell us the truth, we'll send you
to Afghanistan,
and if after Afghanistan
anything is left of you, you will be
sent to Russia
where you will be tortured, you will have no fingers left."[27]

Certainly the detainees themselves knew what probably awaited
them if they were sent home. Most of them had had some dealings with Russian
law enforcement before they went to Afghanistan,
and a few of them had been seriously
mistreated.According to the mother of
Ruslan Odizhev, for example, her son went to Afghanistan in part because he had
been extensively tortured by Russian FSB (security
service) officers
in 2000 and did not think he could continue to live in Russia without danger to his
physical well-being.[28]Airat Vakhitov
said he was beaten in 1999 while in detention for two months on suspicion of
participating in illegal armed formations in Chechnya (he was never
charged).After that experience he decided to leave the country."I knew my life wouldn't work out in Russia,"
he told Human Rights Watch.[29]

The detainees themselves say they repeatedly asked US
officials and representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross
at GuantanamoBay
not to be returned to Russia.
"We all asked not to be returned to Russia because we were afraid of
torture," Airat Vakhitov told Human
Rights Watch.[30]Ravil Gumarov told Human Rights Watch, "We
were asking to be sent to a third country, we didn't want to go to Russia.
We said it to the Red Cross too, that we wanted to go to a third country, any
Islamic country. And we were saying it to the Americans,
that we weren't about to go back to Russia." According to the
detainees, both the US
officials and the Red Cross said they could not influence the decision. "They
said, 'That's all being decided at higher levels, we don't know
anything.'The Red Cross said, 'We
can't do anything.' Their hands were tied."[31]
Shamil Khazhiev told Human Rights Watch, "All of us asked the Red Cross over
and over again not to be sent back to Russia. I didn't bother asking the
Americans because it seemed
useless."[32]

Alexandra Zernova, a human rights activist working with Reprieve, interviewed six of the seven detainees[33]
in early October 2005.She affirmed that
all of them had told her they had not wanted to be sent back to Russia,
and had told US officials so.[34]

According to the detainees, representatives of the Russian
government who visited the detainees at Guantanamo
told them they would certainly be sent back to Russia.Airat Vakhitov
said a senior investigator for the Procuracy
General, Yuri Tkachev, visited him
at Guantanamo and said, "We're going to return
you to Russia
anyway. It's going to be much worse for you there. We're going to show you."[35]In contrast, however, Ravil Gumarov claimed
that Tkachev told him he'd be better off in Russia,
saying, "In America
you'll be in [prison] for life, in Russia
we'll give you a few years."[36]

Vakhitov told
Human Rights Watch that he continued trying to avoid being sent back to Russiaright up until the last minute:

I asked the Red Cross for the last time just before our
return to the homeland. I asked, "Are there any alternatives?" and they said
no, and it would be better if we didn't say that we didn't want to go [On February 28, 2004, the day
the detainees were repatriated] I
refused to go to the airport, and they [the Americans]
brought in a stretcher to take me out.But when I saw the stretcher, I agreed to go on my own.[37]

Return to Russia

On March
1, 2004, just after the detainees landed in Russia, the US State Department
released a brief statement, which
read in part,

The United States
has transferred seven Russian nationals detained at Guantanamo to the control of the Government
of Russia to face criminal charges
relating to their terrorist
activities during an armed conflict.
The transfer is the result of discussions between our two governments over the
past year, including assurances that
the individuals will be detained, investigated and prosecuted, as appropriate, under Russian law and will be treated
humanely in accordance with Russian law and obligations.[38]

Asked whether he had heard that the US government received a
diplomatic assurance that he would not be mistreated after he returned to
Russia, Ravil Gumarov told Human Rights Watch, "I didn't exactly know [about
the assurance]; I understood the opposite, that they gave a guarantee to put us
away in Russia."[39]

Also on March 1, the Procuracy
General of the Russian
Federation released a similarly terse statement, which read in part,

Charges have been brought against seven citizens of Russia detained at a US
military base in Guantanamo
and turned over to the Russian side All these people were recruited by
representatives of radical Islamic organizations and later sent over to Afghanistan,
where they fought on the side of the Taliban.[40]

After their return to Russia
the seven detainees were transferred to a jail in Pyatigorsk, in southern Russia, and
charged with participation in a criminal
conspiracy (article 210.2 of the criminal code) and unlawful crossing of the national
frontier (article 322.2).However, they
were released on June 22,
2004, because of lack of evidence.According to the Russian daily Kommersant,
Russian prosecutors had no proof that the seven men had actually participated
in the fighting in Afghanistan.[41]
Vakhitov told Human Rights Watch
that during nearly four months in
the detention facility in Pyatigorsk, he was visited only once by an
investigator, who appeared to be making little effort to build a case against
him.Instead, the investigator told him
that "we have obligations [to the Americans]
to keep you."[42]Ravil Gumarov told Human Rights Watch that
Russian officials made it clear that the detainees were in Pyatigorsk only to
satisfy the Americans, and that the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
intent on releasing them to defy the United States: "They said, 'We're letting
you out to spite the Americans.'"[43]

While (as has been noted above) the actual substance of
agreements between the US
and Russian governments, written or
unwritten, could not be ascertained,
Human Rights Watch's research has confirmed that the Russian authorities indeed mistreated the ex-Guantanamo
detainees.

Post-Return Abuses by Russia

Russian government abuses of the ex-Guantanamo detainees
fell into three main categories:
torture; harassment; and denial of the right
to a fair trial.Detainees, detainees' relatives, lawyers, and
other individuals with whom Human Rights Watch spoke reported that law
enforcement officers left a clear impression of intending to "get" ("ustroit") the detainees or "hang" ("povesit") a crime
on them.Over the course of several
run-ins with law enforcement, Airat Vakhitov
said, "I was told many times that after my time in Guantanamo, it wasn't necessary to prove I
was a terrorist. That any one of us
could be thrown in jail because we were terrorists."[44]

The two law enforcement agencies described
as most abusive by those whom Human Rights Watch interviewed were the Federal
Security Service,
or "FSB" in Russian; and the Organized Crime
Department of the Ministry of the
Interior, a police unit known by its
Russian acronym "UBOP."[45]Some detainees also complained of abuse by
investigators from the procuracy,
who were responsible for building criminal
cases.Often local and regional FSB and
UBOP conducted interrogations together.Sometimes the men who beat or detained them did not wear any identifying
insignia.

In addition to being serious
violations of human rights for which
the Russian government is primarily responsible, incidents of torture are also
evidence that the US
government violated the Convention against Torture by returning the seven
detainees to Russia.
The fact that all the ex-detainees were frequently harassed by law enforcement,
and two of them were denied a fair trial,
is part of the general pattern of abuse they suffered. But the harassment and
unfair trials also clearly had the
objective of returning the ex-detainees to state custody. These measures
therefore put the ex-detainees at greater risk
of torture as well.

Torture and Ill-Treatment

The mistreatment of the former Guantanamo detainees began from the moment
they touched down on Russian soil.Airat
Vakhitov told Human Rights Watch,

When we [first] got to Russia they didn't torture us, they
just dealt with us very roughly, they beat us when we touched down at
Sheremetyevo ... at the airport, they dragged us down the runway by our feet
through the snow and kicked us. When they brought us on the plane [for the
onward journey to Pyatigorsk] they kicked us again. They asked who among us was
wounded, and whoever said they were wounded got kicked on their wounds.[46]

Ravil Gumarov did not remember
specific abuse, but told Human Rights Watch he thought officials were trying to
act tough by treating the seven men like terrorists,
putting masks on them, tying their hands, and laying them down on the floor of
the airplane.[47]

Vakhitov told
Human Rights Watch that he was only once formally interrogated in prison in Pyatigorsk: he was asked to provide a
chronology of his activities in Afghanistan.Although he was never tortured, on one
occasion while he was praying he was told to get up onto his knees and pray not
to Allah but to Jesus Christ.When he refused, he was rolled over and his
clothes were burned with the ends of cigarettes.[48]Other detainees told lawyer Alexandra Zernova
that the facility in Pyatigorsk was "very quiet" compared to what they had
endured in Guantanamo-and
what some of them endured afterwards.[49]

Rasul Kudaev

Kudaev returned from Guantanamo
in poor health. According to his mother, he suffered from hepatitis, stomach
ulcers, the after-effects of a bullet he received in the hip in Afghanistan
that was never removed, serious
headaches, high blood pressure, and other ailments.These medical problems rendered him unable to
work and to walk without a crutch and a profound limp.[50]

On October
13, 2005, several groups of armed men attacked government buildings
in Nalchik, the republican capital of
Kabardino-Balkaria in southern Russia.Kudaev lived in the village
of Khasania on the outskirts of Nalchik with his mother
and brother.Approximately 150 people
died in the attacks, including at
least 94 people reported to have been attackers, 35 policemen, and 12
civilians.[51]
His mother claims that Kudaev was home on the day of the attack, as he was
every day, due to his health. Ten days later, on October 23, as part of a sweep
of dozens of arrests in connection with the attack, a group of agents picked up
Kudaev at his home.

According to his mother, Fatimat Tekaeva, who was home with
him at the time of the arrest, about two dozen men dressed in camouflage and
masks arrived in armored vehicles,
cars, and trucks, armed with automatic weapons and sniper rifles, and swarmed onto the property.They beat Kudaev as they handcuffed him and
hustled him across the yard.[52]In a statement she wrote on December 28, 2005, in connection with an appeal to the
European Court of Human Rights, Tekaeva said she screamed to her neighbors to
come and witness the fact that her son was walking on his own, because she was
afraid that he would be beaten in custody until he was no longer capable of
walking.In response, she said, an officer of the local UBOP, R. Kiarov, said, "We're not going to beat him here, all will start at
the UBOP."[53]

Several pieces of evidence make it clear that, indeed,
Kudaev was very seriously beaten in
the days immediately after his
arrest.

On October 24 lawyer Irina
Komissarova gained access to Kudaev at the UBOP, also known as the "Sixth
Department." She described the
scene:

Upon arrival at
the Sixth Department I saw Kudaev R.V., who was sitting on a stool, in a
contorted position, holding his stomach. There were a large bruise and many
scratches on the right side of his
face near the eye.Apart from the
investigator, there were many other persons in the office
(three to five people). Investigator Artemenko A., who had worked with him that
day, gave me the record of the interrogation of suspect Kudaev R.V. to
read.After reading the document, I
asked Kudaev R.V. whether he had indeed given the testimony.In response, he expressed the wish to talk to
me alone

In our conversation, Kudaev R.V. told me that he had been
tortured and beaten after he was brought to the Sixth Department.The testimony in the interrogation record was
not his, it had been made up, and it was not correct...

When Kudaev R.V. informed the investigator that he would
not sign the interrogation record all hell broke loose!!!From all sides people in the office gathered around (by the way, none introduced
themselves) and everyone started issuing threats at Kudaev R.V.In the end, he could no longer stand it and
said that he would sign the interrogation record because he was afraid that
after I left they would beat him
again.Someone in the room told me "you
are free to go, we don't need your services
any more."

The fear expressed by Kudaev R.V. that he would again
be beaten I saw as realistic.[54]

On October 25 Kudaev was taken before a Nalchik City Court
judge, who authorized his continued
detention on suspicion of terrorism,
participation in an illegal armed formation, attempt on the life of a law
enforcement official, and murder.[55]After the hearing
he was transferred to a pretrial
detention facility, or SIZO, where he was evidently beaten again.[56]
Komissarova gained access to him the following day:

They almost carried
him in because he could not walk without outside help.In my conversation with him, he told me that
he had been subjected to physical violence.That is, he was beaten when he was delivered to the building of the UBOP
on 23 October 2005,
and he was also brutally beaten at the time of his arrival
at the SIZO on 25 October
2005.He was beaten in the
area of the lower back and on the heels.One could see that he could not straighten out because of the pain, the
leg that he could not stand on twitched, there were bruises on his face.[57]

Komissarova described
other details of Kudaev's wounds to a local journalist:

When I came to the pre-trial
detention centre to talk to Rasul, two men carried
him to me because he couldn't walk. Rasul couldn't hold up his head. On the right side of his face there was a large haematoma,
his eye was full of blood, his head was a strange shape and size, his right leg was broken and he had open wounds on his
hands.[58]

On October 27 Komissarova lodged a formal request for a
forensic medical examination of Kudaev. Later, Kudaev told Komissarova that he
was beaten again on the following day, October 28.[59]

On November 9,
despite her objections, Komissarova was interrogated as a witness in her
client's case. The following day an investigator issued a decision removing
Komissarova as Kudaev's lawyer because she had given witness testimony.[60]

Kudaev was also denied necessary medicines, which may have
contributed to his suffering. Despite daily pleadings from his mother, only
eight days after his arrest did officials on duty at the detention facility
accept packages of medicine that his mother said he required on a daily basis.[61]

In November 2005
photographs of several people detained after the October 13 events, including Rasul Kudaev, began circulating on the
internet. They were all headshots showing the subjects covered with bruises,
sores, and swelling. All of them except the photograph of Kudaev showed the prisoner's number at the bottom of the image, making
it clear that they had come from official investigations.[62]

The photograph of Rasul Kudaev resembles
the others in quality and in the background visible behind the detainees'
heads. Although it is not possible to officially authenticate its provenance,
the preponderance of other evidence of mistreatment of Kudaev suggests that it
is genuine.

-

2005 RFE/RL

2006 RFE/RL

Photographs of Rasul Kudaev, before and after
he was detained, circulated widely on the internet.

Although the photographs were not widely published in local
or national newspapers, which are generally controlled by the authorities, they circulated quickly in cyberspace and contributed
to local uproar about the way the detainees were being treated.The uproar led the president
of Kabardino-Balkaria, Arsen
Kanokov, and the special envoy of the Russian president
to the Northern Caucasus, Dmitri
Kozak, to visit in early December
the detention facility in Nalchik
where Kudaev and others were being held.The two officials were reportedly angry at what they saw and heard and
ordered the facility opened to journalists. Ultimately, the facility was open
on December 8, 2005, but only to
Russian a state-run television crew.Rasul Kudaev was able to speak to the camera.In a letter to his mother, he briefly described
his meeting with Kozak and Kanokov, and said that when he told the two men
about his mistreatment, "the veins on [Kanokov's] neck swelled up with fury. He
left here very angry."[63]However, it appears that neither man took
action against the perpetrators of the abuse of Kudaev or any other of the
detainees.

In addition to the statement by his former lawyer and the
photographs, medical documents also attest to the mistreatment of Kudaev in
detention. The families of detainees who are beaten and tortured often have difficulties
obtaining such medical documents because the authorities
are, for obvious reasons, reluctant to allow independent medical examiners into
Russian detention facilities.

Some medical records that are believed to document Kudaev's
condition have not yet been released to his family and lawyers. But one
has:a note from the ambulance service station in Nalchik, dated November 1,
2005, and signed by the head doctor, Kh.Kh. Sheribov. It states that an ambulance was called at
23:20 on October 23, 2005, to attend to Kudaev. The note does
not specify who called the ambulance or where the ambulance went, although by
that hour Kudaev was already in the custody of the UBOP. The note states that
Kudaev was diagnosed that night as having "psycho-motor excitement,
hypertension in the arteries, and
numerous bruises."[64]

The local procuracy
refused to accept a petition filed by Kudaev's lawyer to open a criminal investigation of Kudaev's mistreatment, and
on July 6, 2006,
Nalchik City Court upheld the procuracy's
decision.But in a decision that surprised Kudaev's family and local human rights organizations, on August 25, 2006, the Supreme Court of
Kabardino-Balkaria overruled the
city court and ordered it to reconsider its ruling.[65]
The case is now pending again before NalchikCity Court.

Rasul Kudaev has submitted documents to the European Court
of Human Rights claiming that he was
tortured.

Timur Ishmuratov

Timur Ishmuratov also experienced
beatings at the hands of the FSB and the UBOP.He remembered that just
before the detainees were released from Pyatigorsk, a high-ranking FSB official
met with all of them and told them that "the Russian government has no
complaints against you." According to Ishmuratov, "[The official said that] if
you live according to the law, then you won't have any harassment. He cited the
Russian leadership. I believed him."[66]

Ishmuratov was wrong.

In the early morning of January 8, 2005, an explosion occurred on a
small pipeline delivering home
heating fuel to a residential section of Bugulma, a city in southern Tatarstan,
several hundred kilometers east of Moscow.
Ishmuratov and his wife lived in a small town not far away. There were no
casualties in the explosion. After several months of being called in for
increasingly aggressive questioning and harassment (documented later in this
report), Ishmuratov was taken into custody on April
1, 2005, from the Bugulma mosque where he worked as a guard.On April
13, he described the initial period of his detention in a four-page handwritten statement that was later smuggled out of the
Almetevsk detention facility. His statement said that during
the first few days of interrogations he refused to confess to the crime. But on April
5, he was brought for the first time to the FSB, where the interrogation turned
violent. He wrote,

At around 3 p.m.,
they took me to the FSB, into a room for visitors where two employees of the
police organized crime unit [UBOP]
named Farid and Damir forced me to
take off my clothes.I stripped to my underwear; the window was open and it
was very cold.Then they started to beat
me up.They punched me in my head and
face, knocked me on the floor and kicked me.Kuzmin [Nikolai A. Kuzmin, head of the Bugulma City Internal Affairs
Department] and Engalychev [Ravil Rinatovich,
head of the Bugulma branch of the FSB] were present.Kuzmin also hit me a few times.They demanded that I give a confession of my
participation in the pipeline explosion.During all this they
threatened to call in my mother and my pregnant wife for questioning.They also brought in a copy of the Koran and
were throwing it around and covering
it with cigarette ashes, which put strong pressure on my religious
feelings.Kuzmin said he'd already
"worked over" Ildar Valiev and my brother Rustam Khamidullin and that they'd
given the necessary testimony.Kuzmin
said, "Your brother lasted two days, how long will you hold out?" Around 11 p.m. I agreed to give them the
testimony they needed.I agreed to give
[it], being unable to withstand the physical and psychological pressure, and
also out of concern for my wife and unborn child They warned me that I had to
stick to the testimony in all my interrogations, otherwise they'd beat me up
again.[67]

Ishmuratov's mother told Human Rights Watch that security service
officers brought Ishmuratov in
handcuffs to the maternity hospital, where his wife had just delivered a baby,
to put pressure on his family not to hire a lawyer to pursue complaints of
abuse.[68]Ishmuratov's lawyer told Human Rights Watch
that his client knew that his brother had been taken into custody, and this
added to the psychological pressure on Ishmuratov.[69]
(Ishmuratov's brother, Rustam Khamidullin, told Human Rights Watch that police
from the Tatarstan republic-level UBOP detained him at his aunt's house in
Nefteyugansk, Khanti-Mansiisk district
in western Siberia,
on March 31, 2005. Police held him for several days at the Nefteyugansk police
station and beat him while he was handcuffed to a radiator to coerce him to
admit that he had witnessed preparations for the crime.
Police then took him by train to Tatarstan. Khamidullin told Human Rights Watch
that he was kept in a regular compartment of a passenger train and beaten on
the head and body during the two-day
train journey.[70])

Ishmuratov later recanted his confession in both his 2005 trial and 2006 retrial.

Ishmuratov's April
13 statement asked for a criminal
case to be opened against the men who had beaten him in detention and ended
with two stark sentences: "I ask you to help me escape from torture and obtain
justice. I'm a former prisoner of
the American camp at Guantanamo, where I endured the bullying of the American military, and now I'm treated even worse by
the special forces and law enforcement authorities
of Russia."[71]
No investigation of his allegations of mistreatment was ever undertaken. He was
ultimately sentenced to 11 years and one month in prison,
in part on the basis of the confession that he says he was beaten and
threatened into giving.

Ravil Gumarov

Ravil Gumarov was detained on April
1, 2005, on suspicion of participating with Ishmuratov in the Bugulma pipeline
explosion.According to Gumarov he
confessed to the pipeline explosion as a result of torture by FSB and UBOP
officials, even though he later recanted that confession in court
testimony.He was convicted and sentenced to 13 years' imprisonment.

Toward the end of January 2005 Rustam Garifullin, the deputy director of the UBOP in
Naberezhnyi Chelni, Tatarstan, had summoned Gumarov to ask him whether he was
involved in the pipeline incident, but did not arrest him. Then on April 1 Garifullin
detained Gumarov at his mother's apartment, supposedly just to ask a few
questions. The next time she saw her son was in court several months later.[72]

Gumarov told Human Rights Watch that he was deprived of sleep for seven or eight days after his
arrest in Naberezhnyi Chelny. He was kept in a tiny cage, about one meter by
half a meter, where he was allowed to sit on a tiny bench during the day while being interrogated, but at night
he was fastened by one handcuff to the bars of the cage over his head.He was continually asked to confess to the
pipeline explosion.After a week or 10
days he was transferred to a room in the administrative
building housing the FSB in Bugulma.There he was tortured using a common technique of Russian law
enforcement:a gas mask is put over the
detainee's head and then the oxygen is turned off, producing the beginnings of
asphyxiation and a sense of panic.[73]
This form of torture is known in Russia as "little elephant," or "slonik," because the tube dangling from
the front of the mask resembles the
trunk of an elephant.

Gumarov told Human Rights Watch that investigators also
pulled hairs from his beard, and on one occasion poured an entire bottle of vodka
down his throat, a particularly offensive form of mistreatment for an observant
Muslim."I hadn't had any alcohol for
seven years, they poured a bottle in me and I was out of it," he told Human
Rights Watch.[74]
Gumarov told a Moscow
press conference that at one point, while he was being beaten on his back to
force a confession, he said, "What are you doing? This is like 1937 [the height
of Stalin's repression]," and they answered, "If this were 1937, you'd have
been shot a long time ago."[75]
He told his mother that investigators had drugged him with a special kind of
tea to get him to sign a confession. Eventually, he did. In a handwritten letter that was smuggled out of the detention
facility in Bugulma and brought to his mother, Gumarov wrote,

Mama, don't listen to the authorities,
no matter what they say about me My nerves gave in, I couldn't take it. I
spoke against myself and the worst thing is that I spoke against others.
Everyone has a limit for what they
can take, and many break sooner or later. They broke me too. It seems I'm
destined to serve time for something I didn't do.[76]

Harassment and Arbitrary Detention

Faced with the return of seven former detainees from Guantanamo, Russian law
enforcement might legitimately have been expected to keep an eye on whether the
men were engaged in any suspicious activity after they got home. Such
surveillance could have been conducted while also respecting the ex-detainees'
human rights. It was not.

The detainees and their family members
uniformly complained of being frequently called, followed, and threatened by
the FSB, UBOP, and other police officials after their return.Some family members
reported that their homes were searched without warrants, in violation of
Russian and international law.Some
reported, in fact, that their homes were so frequently searched that they were
unable to provide exact dates of those searches.

Ravil Gumarov told Human Rights Watch that officials from
the FSB and UBOP called him at least once a week, beginning right away after he returned home from the
Pyatigorsk prison to Naberezhnyi
Chelny. They frequently requested that he come down to their offices for questioning, and a car followed his
every movement outside the home for about a month after he returned.[77]Two investigators from the FSB and the UBOP
called so often that Gumarov's mother recognized their voices and knew their
names and telephone numbers."They
called Ravil in all the time, whenever anything happened There was a shooting
somewhere, and they called him in; somebody committed a murder somewhere, and
again they called him in."[78]

After being released from Pyatigorsk in June 2004, Ruslan
Odizhev returned to his family's home in Nalchik.According to his mother the harassment began
immediately: "They came all the
time, threatening, calling him all the time to the department, the first
department, the sixth department [the UBOP, which was] well-known to us, the
Gestapo."She drew aside the curtain at
the apartment's window to point out to Human Rights Watch researchers where a
modest, unmarked car used to be always parked, so the FSB could keep an eye on
their movements.[79]

For other former Guantanamo
detainees the harassment did not begin right
away.Timur Ishmuratov said he believed
the words of the high-ranking FSB official who told all the detainees, as they
were preparing to leave the Russian
detention facility in Pyatigorsk, that if they lived within the law they would
not face any harassment."I believed
him, I got out, tried to build a
personal life, got married, tried to find work," he said.[80]He moved to the small town of Urussu, near Bugulma,
where he found temporary jobs on construction sites and working for a
mosque.But in mid-January 2005, about a
week after the explosion on a local gas pipeline (described
above), his mother called from Bugulma to say security
operatives were looking for him.

Ishmuratov went into Bugulma voluntarily,
thinking he could easily demonstrate his innocence, and found a large group of
officials from the FSB and the UBOP waiting for him.They interrogated him for six hours.To his surprise,
although they asked a few questions about where he had been on January 8 (the
day of the explosion) and the day before, most of the questions were about Guantanamo, Islam, the
Russian officials he had spoken with in Pyatigorsk, and who figured in his
current circle of acquaintances.After
that he was called in for questioning often, sometimes two to three times a
week.And although the early
interrogations were mostly respectful, over time they grew increasingly
aggressive and vulgar.Ishmuratov was
particularly offended by the interrogators' use of curse words, since he had
not used such words in the five years since he had become an observant
Muslim."I thought because I was innocent,
it would stop," he said of the harassment.[81]

After his release from Pyatigorsk, Shamil Khazhiev returned
to Uchali, a small town in the Russian republic of Bashkortostan,
where his family lived. Human rights
activist Alexandra Zernova, who met with Khazhiev on several occasions, said
that he was repeatedly questioned by local FSB and UBOP officials after his
return, and was briefly detained in Ufa, the Bashkortostan
capital, in December 2004, on
suspicion of membership in Hizb
ut-Tahrir. He was released without
charge. In September 2005, while riding on a train, he was questioned by UBOP
officials from Samara.According to
Zernova, Khazhiev has been unable to secure employment since his return from Guantanamo.[82]
He left Russia
in March 2007.

Airat Vakhitov
told Human Rights Watch that he was subjected to constant police harassment and
mistreatment over the course of nearly two years after his release from
post-Guantanamo detention in Pyatigorsk."They constantly called me in for interrogation and told me they were
following me, so that I mustn't think I'd be at liberty for long," Vakhitov told Human Rights Watch.He moved around constantly, sleeping in
different places, because "I'm afraid to stay in one place in Russia."[83]

In early April
2005, acquaintances at UBOP in Tatarstan, where Vakhitov
was from, warned him he should go into hiding."I was in hiding for several months in various
apartments, giving my tailers the slip. There was always a tail."[84]
During this period
the authorities called Vakhitov on his cell phone and told him that his
request for a passport for foreign travel had been granted.When he went into the passport office in Kazan,
"the boss of the passport desk placed a call to [law enforcement] operatives
and started stalling for time.I
understood that they were going to arrest me. In fact my passport wasn't ready
yet; they had tricked me.I stood in the corridor
and saw the group of goons, and then quietly I got out of there."[85]

Vakhitov moved to
Moscow, where
he was joined by fellow ex-Guantanamo detainee Rustam Akhmiarov.On August 27, 2005, Vakhitov
and Akhmiarov were seized from the
apartment of Islamic activist[86]
Gaidar Jemal by unidentified men, whom Vakhitov
believes were from the UBOP.Before
being removed from the apartment, Vakhitov
and Akhmiarov managed to call a
journalist and soon the news of their seizure was being relayed over Ekho
Moskvy , an independent radio station broadcasting in the Russian
capital.These radio reports may have
prompted a sudden phone call to their two captors as Vakhitov
and Akhmiarov were being driven outside Moscow
along a lonely road surrounded by forest.Vakhitov told Human Rights
Watch that the caller appeared to have told the captors that they had to change
plans; the car turned around and headed for Sheremetyevo airport instead, and
from there Vakhitov and Akhmiarov were flown to a detention facility in Kazan.

According to Vakhitov
they were not mistreated in detention, although an official of the Tatarstan
procuracy described
them publicly as terrorists, without
providing any evidence.In violation of
Russian law, neither man was present during
a court hearing that sanctioned
their continued detention.[87]On August 30 Amnesty International issued an
urgent action appeal on their behalf, while Alexandra Zernova gave several
interviews from London
and called Russian authorities to
protest the detention. The two men were not formally charged, and were released
in Naberezhnyi Chelny on September 2, 2005.[88]

Rasul Kudaev was also the target of frequent harassment and
threats by law enforcement personnel, sometimes in uniform and sometimes not,
after his release from post-Guantanamo detention in Pyatigorsk.Sometimes they came to speak to him at his
home in Khasania.Sometimes they took
him away for questioning.For example,
in June 2005 authorities visited him
and threatened to arrest him for evading military service
in the Russian army and falsifying documents. On August 15, 2005, two men in masks and two
without masks came to his home and said they wanted to speak with him about
Ruslan Odizhev, the other former Guantanamo
detainee who lived nearby.These
unidentified agents took him to the offices
of the UBOP and interrogated him for several hours, without presenting any
identification, warrants, or other documentation.

"From the moment he returned home in '04, when the Americans turned him over from the Guantanamo camp,
we've been under continuous pressure from law enforcement and special forces,
trying repeatedly to fabricate criminal charges against him," Kudaev's mother,
Fatimat Tekaeva, told Human Rights Watch.[89]

In addition to threats, phone calls, visits, and repeated
detentions for questioning by law enforcement, the former Guantanamo detainees suffered from a more
subtle, but highly disruptive, form of harassment: the difficulty of getting
Russian authorities to return their
basic identity documents.Without such
documents, the former detainees experienced
great difficulty in finding a job, housing, and medical treatment.

The lack of official identity papers posed a particularly serious problem for Rasul Kudaev, who had received serious injuries
in Afghanistan and was
still suffering the aftereffects,
according to his mother.The family
negotiated with a hospital to remove a bullet from Kudaev's hip that was
causing him pain and impeding his movement, but they were unable to get the
personal identity documents that the hospital required before it could treat
him.Kudaev's mother told Human Rights
Watch,

The fact was, we couldn't get a copy of his birth
certificate for half a year!Every day
we drove around the district: three
hours here, three hours there.And where
was I supposed to get money for all this? They wouldn't give us the documents
How much my nerves suffered, how much my health, and how much money I spent on
this, only Allah knows.And then we got
[the document], and then we had to get a passport, and then we needed a medical
insurance policy, because you can't get [medical] treatment in Russia
without that.We'd just gotten the
passport, and a month later the events [of October 13, and Kudaev's arrest]
happened.We just didn't make it in time
for the operation.[90]

Although obtaining official documents from the Russian
bureaucracy can be a trying experience for anyone, not only a former detainee of Guantanamo, such an
extremely attenuated process is highly unusual.

Ruslan Odizhev was also unable to obtain his internal
passport (national identity document), which was necessary to obtain formal
work.His mother believes that pressure
from the FSB kept the local police from giving him the document because it was
only through the intervention of a friendly
FSB officer that Odizhev finally did
receive his passport in spring 2005.
However, he went into hiding soon thereafter, never having had a formal job
after his release from Guantanamo.[91]

Ravil Gumarov found it difficult to find work, even once his
identity papers had been returned to him. "It's like there's a stamp on us," he
said at a Moscow
press conference in October 2005. "We're like, out of Guantanamo, and they stamp you and no one
will hire you, it's impossible to set yourself up anywhere."[92]
He later told Human Rights Watch, "Even friends
won't give you work [after Guantanamo]
because they're afraid of the FSB."[93]

Criminal Investigations and Prosecution

Gumarov and Ishmuratov have stood trial
twice (in 2005 and 2006) and gone through an appeal hearing
for the Bugulma pipeline explosion. The trials
were riddled with procedural
irregularities that call into serious question whether their right
to a fair trial was respected.Those irregularities
started with neither man being given immediate
access to a lawyer, although both asked for them. Ishmuratov said that he began
asking for a lawyer on April 1, the
day he was detained.[94]

In September 2005
a jury at the Tatarstan Supreme Court in Kazan
unanimously acquitted Gumarov, Ishmuratov, and a third defendant, Fanis Shaikhutdinov,
of the pipeline explosion.The event was
hailed in the media as "the first
time in Russia a not-guilty
verdict is reached in a terrorism
case," and the three men gave a press conference in Moscow describing
their mistreatment in detention.[95]

Prosecutors submitted a request to the Supreme Court of
Russia to "annul" the acquittal, a request that was granted on January 17, 2006.Annulments of jury verdicts are not uncommon
in Russia,
despite the prohibition on double jeopardy under both Russian and international
law. The procurator general of Tatarstan, Kafil Amirov, insisted that the second
trial did not constitute double
jeopardy because the first verdict had been "annulled" ["otmenyon"], as though it had never existed. He said, "We think the
jurors took this case too lightly. They didn't fully understand they're simple
people."[96]

Gumarov and Shaikhutdinov
went into hiding in Moscow,
where they were rearrested in the apartment of Airat Vakhitov.
Ishmuratov fled to Ukraine
on January 27 and attempted to claim political asylum. His request was denied
and he was deported back to Russia
on February 6.[97]

The second trial,
also a jury trial in the Tatarstan
Supreme Court, ended on May 5, 2006, with a unanimous vote to convict all three defendants of terrorism (article 205 of the Russian Criminal Code) and illegal possession of weapons or
explosives (article 222). They were also ordered to pay the equivalent of about
US$2,000 in property damages.On May 12
the court sentenced Gumarov to 13 years of imprisonment,
and Ishmuratov to 11 years and one month; Fanis
Shakhutdinov was sentenced to 15
years and five months.

Lawyers and relatives of the accused expressed suspicion
that two juries could reach such
diametrically different verdicts,
and believe that the second jury was pressured to convict.
Defense lawyers appealed the case to the Russian Supreme Court in July 2006,
arguing that the case should be retried
due to procedural irregularities,
including the prosecution's
introduction of new witnesses without any opportunity for pretrial cross-examination, as required by Russian law.
The three-judge panel of the Supreme Court returned its decision on November
29, 2006, after half an hour of deliberation. The panel reduced the
sentences of each of the three defendants, without making any change to the
verdicts (although the harshness of the sentences had not been a feature of the
appeals, which were rejected in full).[98]

In July 2006 Human Rights Watch found a signed confession to
the Bugulma pipeline explosion in the case file of another criminal investigation. The five-page confession was
signed by Vilsur Khairullin, who was accused of conspiring
to blow up key industrial targets in
Tatarstan in 2005. According to the document, the interrogation was conducted
by an investigator in the serious crimes division of the Tatarstan procuracy, V.A. Maksimov, on July 7, 2005, between 10:10 a.m. and 1 p.m. In the confession,
Khairullin says that he planned and executed the explosion alone.[99]

Gumarov and Ishmuratov were in custody at the time
Khairullin made his confession, awaiting trial
for the same crime. Yet prosecutors
never mentioned the confession to lawyers for either defendant. Investigator
Maksimov told the Washington Postthat he took Khairullin to the scene of the crime, but Khairullin was unable to identify the
exact location of the explosion, so they did not feel it necessary to inform
defense lawyers for Gumarov, Ishmuratov, and Shaikhutdinov
about his confession.[100]

Given the record of torture among Russian investigators, it
seems entirely possible that Khairullin's confession was not genuine. But as a
matter of due process, such potentially exculpatory evidence should have been
made available to the defendants.And if
the confession was not genuine, it raises the question of what methods Russian
investigators might have used to extract
it.

Rasul Kudaev, the other ex-Guantanamo detainee currently in
detention, has not yet been formally indicted or prosecuted, more than one year
after his arrest in Nalchik.
Kudaev's extensive torture by Russian authorities
was detailed above.In addition,
Kudayev's right under Russian and
international law to be represented by a lawyer was compromised when Irina Komissarova, his original
lawyer, was removed from the case.

Conclusion

The motivations of the Russian government in this
post-Guantanamo story remain obscure.The Procuracy General, which
negotiated the detainees' return with the Americans,
supposedly pledged to prosecute them for terrorism.
Yet Russian officials made at best desultory attempts to build cases against
the seven men. Both Gumarov and Vakhitov
told Human Rights Watch that while in detention in Pyatigorsk they were
interrogated only once, and even then somewhat haphazardly. Gumarov told Human
Rights Watch that his interrogator seemed to be trying to figure out if he,
Gumarov, had actually been sent to Afghanistan
for Russian intelligence.[101]Later, when they were released, the detainees
were given the impression that the Russian Ministry
of Foreign Affairs intervened on their behalf, to spite the Americans. But at that time they did not encounter officials from any ministry
who seemed truly keen to prosecute. Moreover, the decision to release such
internationally significant prisoners
would likely have been taken at a higher level than the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the moment of release,
according to Gumarov, Russian officials were portraying themselves to the
detainees in a positive light. "The Americans
wanted to put you away, but we're letting you out, we're such good guys,"
Gumarov quoted Russian officials as saying.[102]

Local Russian officials were the ones who tortured,
harassed, and mistreated the ex-Guantanamo detainees. There is no evidence to
suggest that they did so according to a specific directive from the national
government. But this does not absolve Moscow
of responsibility for the fate of these seven men. The obligation not to
tolerate torture stems from the Russian government's signature and ratification
of the Convention against Torture, as well as many other international treaties
and agreements.

This obligation was not, in fact, derived
from the flimsy, non-binding agreement that the Russian and American governments mentioned at the time of the
detainees' transfer. Indeed, the evidence of torture and mistreatment presented
in this report demonstrates the fundamental powerlessness of such a "diplomatic
assurance." When a government is failing to honor its basic obligation not to
torture suspects in its custody-when it is violating its own promises under
international law-unenforceable bilateral agreements about torture do not
provide any additional safeguards for detainees.

Nor do such agreements lift any legal obligations for the
country sending the detainee back home.Since September 11, 2001, the US government has advanced several
novel and pernicious interpretations of international law, including the law on torture. The Bush administration's attack on the Geneva Conventions, for
example, has ignited a storm of criticism
worldwide. Unfortunately, the US
government's novel and pernicious use of "diplomatic assurances" has not been
as widely condemned by the international community-in large part because other
governments, particularly Western European states and Canada, are using them too. These
governments have played, therefore, an indirect role in the shameless use of
"diplomatic assurances" that is described
in this report.

Immediate
responsibility for the suffering of
these seven Russian men lies of course with the Russian government.But the US government must bear its share
of the blame as well. Given the commonplace nature of torture by Russian law
enforcement, it seems implausible that the Americans
could have sent home these seven men, branded as they were by the "stamp of Guantanamo," and expected
them to suffer anything less than the misery that they have, in fact, endured.

Acknowledgements

This report was written
by Carroll Bogert, associate
director of Human Rights Watch, and researched together with the deputy
director of Human Rights Watch's Moscowoffice, Alexander Petrov, and Moscowoffice
director Allison Gill. Europe and Central Asia Division associate Eugene Sokoloff also assisted in research. Europe and Central Asia Division associate Iwona
Zielinska helped to format the report and publications specialist Grace Choi
prepared it for final publication.

Rachel Denber,
deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia
division at Human Rights Watch, edited the report.Others at Human Rights Watch who read and
commented on the text were: Julia Hall , senior researcher in the Europe and
Central Asia Division; Diederik
Lohman, senior researcher in the HIV/AIDS program; Joanne Mariner,
director of the Terrorism/Counterterrorism program; Veronika Szente Goldston, advocacy
director of the Europe and Central Asia Division; Dinah PoKempner, general
counsel; and Ian Gorvin, consultant
in the Program Office.

London-based human rights
activist Alexandra Zernova provided invaluable assistance in research, as did
Elena Ryabinina of the Russian human rights
group Civic Assistance. Human Rights
Watch is grateful to the victims,
families, lawyers, and human rights
activists who generously gave their time and energy to help tell the story of Russia's
ex-Guantanamo detainees.

AppendixI. Letter to the US officials

September 27, 2006

Sandy Hodgkinson

U.S. Department of State2201 C Street NWWashington, DC20520

Dear Ms.
Hodgkinson:

I am writing to you
for information about the seven Russian citizens who were repatriated to the Russian Federation from the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
on February 28, 2004.

Russian and U.S.
media have provided somewhat contradictory accounts of this repatriation, so I
hope to ascertain the facts by turning directly to you. Human Rights Watch is
currently preparing a report on the treatment of former Guantanamo
detainees after the return to Russia,
and this information will be critical to providing a full account of their
experience.

As you may know,
Human Rights Watch is an international human rights research and advocacy
organization, working in more than 70 countries around the world. For the
accuracy and credibility of our reports, we seek information about human rights
abuse from a wide variety of sources, including governments.

In particular, we
are interested in the following information:

1)The U.S. State Department's statement on March
1, 2004 says that "The transfer is the result of discussions between our two
governments over the past year, including assurances that the individuals will
be detained, investigated and prosecuted, as appropriate, under Russian law and
will be treated humanely in accordance with Russian law and obligations." What
was the substance of these assurances? Were they made in written or oral form?
If written form, could a copy of them be provided to Human Rights Watch?

2)The detainees with whom I spoke said that they
talked to both US officials
and the ICRC about their fears of being returned to Russia. Did anyone in the US
government respond formally to the detainees' concerns? Did the ICRC convey the
detainees' concerns to the US
government, and if so, how did the US government respond to them?

3)Did the U.S. government put in place any
monitoring mechanism to determine if the detainees were, in fact, treated
humanely by the Russians after their return?

4)The March 1, 2004 statement of the General
Procuracy of the Russian
Federation stated that "charges had been
filed" against all seven detainees. Did the U.S. government provide case files
on the detainees to the Russian government to substantiate such charges?

5)Why was Russian citizen Ravil Mingazov not part
of the agreement that secured the release of the other seven detainees? Is the
Russian government currently attempting to secure his release from Guantanamo?

6)Did the Russian government give advance notice
to the U.S.
government that it intended to release the seven men on June 22, 2004? If not,
how did the U.S.
government learn of their release? Did the U.S. government raise any
objections to their release, either before or after June 22, 2004?

Thank you in
advance for your assistance. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate
to contact me at 212-216-1244.

I am writing to you with a request for information about the
seven Russian citizens who were repatriated to the Russian
Federation from the US
detention facility at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, on 1
March, 2004.

Although the mass media covered the return of these seven
men, some of their accounts provide contradictory information about the process
of their return. For this reason we turn to you with a request for reliable
information.

As you may know, Human Rights Watch is a neutral,
international, non-governmental human rights organization with headquarters in
the United States and
offices in London, Geneva,
Brussels, Moscow
and Tashkent.

We have written a great deal about human rights abuses at GuantanamoBay,
and wish to supplement this work with information about the return of former Guantanamo detainees to
their home countries. We are also turning to the U.S. authorities for such
information.

In particular, we are interested in the following
information:

1)The 1 March statement of the General Procuracy
of the Russian Federation
stated that charges had been filed against all seven detainees. What were those
charges? On what date were those charges dropped? Why were they dropped?

2)The 1 March statement also says that"All these people were recruited by
representatives of radical Islamic organizations and later sent over to Afghanistan,
where they fought on the side of the Taliban."Does the General Procuracy still believe this to be the case? What
evidence did the Russian government have for that assertion at the time? Did
the U.S.
government provide case files on the detainees to substantiate such charges?
Had all seven individuals come to the attention of Russian law enforcement
before they left Russia for Afghanistan?

3)The 1 March statement by the U.S. State
Department says that "The transfer is the result of discussions between our two
governments over the past year, including assurances that the individuals will
be detained, investigated and prosecuted, as appropriate, under Russian law and
will be treated humanely in accordance with Russian law and obligations." What
was the substance of these assurances? Were they made in written or oral form?
If written form, could a copy of them be provided to Human Rights Watch?

4)As part of those assurances, did the Russian
government provide any kind of regular updates on the detainees' status to the U.S.
authorities? Did U.S.
authorities ever make any formal subsequent inquiries about the detainees'
condition?

5)Why was Russian citizen Ravil Mingazov not part
of the agreement that secured the release of the other seven detainees? Is the
Russian government currently attempting to secure his release from Guantanamo?

Thank you in advance for your assistance in this regard. If
you need any further information, please do not hesitate to contact our Moscow office at 737-8955.

With best regards,

Carroll Bogert

Associate Director

Human Right Watch

[1] An eighth Russian citizen,
Ravil Mingazov, remains in custody in Guantanamo
at this writing.

[3] Their names have been
spelled differently in different databases and some detainees have even been
listed under different names. For example, Rasul Kudaev is referred to as
Abdullah Kafkas in one US Department of Defense list. This report uses standard
transliteration from Cyrillic of the
detainees' names as they were commonly known in Russian.

[4] Many of them spoke another
local language such as Tatar, in addition to Russian.

[5] Rasul Kudaev told reporters
that he did not support Islamic government because he had seen how such a
government operates in Afghanistan, and
"there's war there all the time." See "Rasul Kudaev, arrested in
Kabardino-Balkaria, has not turned
up in Pyatigorsk prison" ("Rasula Kadaeva, arestovanogo v
Kabardino-Balkarii, v pyatigorskoi
tyurme ne okazalos"), Caucasian Knot
News, January 20, 2006,http://www.kavkaz.memo.ru/newstext/news/id/922021.html
(accessed July 22, 2006). At least three of the detainees said they went to Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic bordering on Afghanistan, because of repression
against Muslims in Russia.
They claim they were seized there by fighters for the Islamic Movement of
Uzbekistan and taken to Afghanistan, where
they were imprisoned.

[6] Ruslan Odizhev was not
interviewed by Reprieve because he
quickly went into hiding after his return to Russia. Interviews with Reprieve on file with Human Rights Watch.

[7] Although the Russian
detainees' allegations were taken in the context of preparing
litigation, their accounts are consistent with numerous other accounts of
detainee abuse at Guantanamo collected by Human Rights Watch in its research in
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, Saudi
Arabia, and the UK and other accounts and reports collected for the Detainee
Abuse and Accountability Project, a joint project of Human Rights Watch, Human
Rights First, and the New York University Center for Human Rights and Global
Justice. See Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, NYU CHRGJ, By the Numbers: Findings of the Detainee
Abuse and Accountability Project, April
2006, http://hrw.org/reports/2006/ct0406/index.htm.

[9]Convention
against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (Convention against Torture), adopted
December 10, 1984, G.A. res. 39/46,
annex, 39 U.N. GAOR Supp. (No. 51) at 197, U.N. Doc. A/39/51 (1984), entered
into force June 26, 1987, ratified by the United States on October 21, 1994,
art. 2(2): "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or
a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency,
may be invoked as a justification of torture."

[13] The US government has argued that, in respect of Guantanamo detainees, it is not bound by the
nonrefoulement obligations of the Convention against Torture because GuantanamoBay
is not technically part of the territorial United
States, an argument that has been rejected
by the US Supreme Court.But the US has also
said thatit has a policy of not returning aliens held overseas to
torture, even though it argues that is not legally obligated not to do so under
the Convention against Torture.See
Responses by the US Delegation to questions from the Committee [against
Torture] (Oral presentation to the Committee), May 8, 2006,
http://www.usmission.ch/Press2006/USPresentationtotheCAT.html (accessed
February 15, 2007).

[14]Email communication from US State Department official Ashley Deeks to
Human Rights Watch, February 26, 2007. Human Rights Watch's letter to US
officials requesting information for this report can be found inAppendix
I. Human RightsWatch's letter to the Russian prosecutor general's office requesting information for this report can be
found in Appendix II. Russian officials did not respond to this request in time
for the publication of this report.

[16] For this reason, UN and
other anti-torture monitoring bodies
insist on confidential interviews with detainees. Notably, the United Nations
special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, cancelled a trip to Russia in October 2006 because the
Russian government refused him confidentiality when speaking with victims of torture. "Press Conference by the United Nations Representative on Torture
Convention,"United Nations Department
of Public Information statement from news conference,, October 23, 2006,
http://www.un.org/News/briefings/docs/2006/061023_Nowak.doc.htm
(accessed January 14, 2007).

[17] Human Rights Watch interview
with a US official, Moscow, July 2006.

[19] United Nations Committee
against Torture, "Conclusions and recommendations of the Committee against Torture : Russian Federation,"
CAT/C/CR/28/4, June 6, 2002,
http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/(Symbol)/CAT.C.CR.28.4.En?Opendocument
(accessed September 24, 2006).

[20] European Committee for the
Prevention of Torture, "Report to the Russian Government on the Visit to the
Russian Federation carried out by
the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading
Treatment or Punishment," CPT/Inf
(2003) 30, June 30, 2003,http://www.cpt.coe.int/documents/rus/2003-30-inf-eng.pdf (accessed September 24, 2006), p. 13.

[53] Written
testimony of Fatimat Tekaeva, appendix document 4 submitted to the European
Court of Human Rights, dated December
28, 2005, unpublished document on file with Human Rights Watch.

[54] Complaint to the lawyers'
association of Kabardino-Balkaria
Republic, the procuracy of
Kabardino-Balkaria Republic, and
others by Irina Komissarova,
appendix document 11 submitted to the European Court of Human Rights, dated November 3, 2005, unpublished document on file with
Human Rights Watch.

[55]Ruling of the Nalchik City Court, October 25, 2005, on file with Human
Rights Watch. At this writing,
Kudaev has not been formally indicted.

[56] SIZO is the Russian acronym
for sledstvennyi izoliator, or
"investigation-isolation unit."

[57] Complaint to the lawyers'
association of Kabardino-BalkariaRepublic
by Irina Komissarova.

[59] Timeline of the arrest of
Rasul Kudaev, section 14.23, document submitted to the European Court of Human
Rights, unpublished document on file with Human Rights Watch.

[60] Decision on the removal of
lawyer by Kotliarov E.A. of the Procuracy
General of the Russian Federation for the Southern Federal Region of November 10, 2005, appendix document 22 submitted to
the European Court of Human Rights, unpublished document (in Russian) on file
with Human Rights Watch. The prosecutor's office
invited Komissarova in to discuss her allegations that her client had been
abused, and then she was promptly prohibited from representing him because she
had given evidence in the case. Human Rights Watch interview with Irina Komissarova, Nalchik, Russia,
July 25, 2006. Human Rights Watch has found several cases in the Russian criminal defense system of energetic defense lawyers
being barred from serving their clients after they are forced to submit to
interrogations and then declared "witnesses."

[76] Letter obtained in Human
Rights Watch interview with Saria
Gumarova, August 3, 2006, copy on file with Human Rights Watch. In his
interview with Human Rights Watch, Gumarov himself confirmed that the letter
was genuine.

[90] Human Rights Watch interview
with Fatimat Tekaeva, July 26, 2006. The "passport" she refers to is a national
identity card, not an international travel document. She was an eyewitness to
the harassment described here.

[101] Human Rights Watch interview
with Ravil Gumarov, date and place withheld. Ishmuratov also told a Moscow press conference
that after the Bugulma pipeline explosion, local FSB officials seemed to think he might have
been recruited by the national FSB while he was in Pyatigorsk. See Ishmuratov,
Gumarov, and Shakhutdinov, press
conference, October 14, 2005.